Intel spills the beans on Cascade Lake

Chipzilla has announced part of its upcoming Cascade Lake strategy and teased plans for a new Xeon platform called Cascade Lake Advanced Performance, or Cascade Lake-AP.

The announcement comes before the Supercomputing 2018 conference where more details are expected to be announced.

Cascade Lake-AP doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining several Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI.

Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server.

Intel chose to share two competitive performance numbers alongside the disclosure of Cascade Lake-AP. One of these is that a top-end Cascade Lake-AP system can put up 3.4x the Linpack throughput of a dual-socket AMD Epyc 7601 platform.

If this benchmark proves true it could hurt AMD. The AVX-512 instruction set gives Intel CPUs a major leg up on the competition in high-performance computing applications where floating-point throughput is paramount.

Intel used its own compilers to create binaries for this comparison, and that decision could create favourable Linpack performance results versus AMD CPUs too.